A script for running processes in parallel in Bash

In Bash you can start new processes (theads) on the background simply by running a command with ampersand &. The wait command can be used to wait until all background processes have finished (to wait for a certain process do wait PID where PID is a process ID). So here’s a simple pseudocode for parallel processing:

for ARG in  $*; do
    command $ARG &
    NPROC=$(($NPROC+1))
    if [ "$NPROC" -ge 4 ]; then
        wait
        NPROC=0
    fi
done

I.e. you run 4 processes at a time and wait until all of them have finished before executing the next four. This is a sufficient solution if all of the processes take equally long to finish. However this is suboptimal if running time of the processes vary a lot.

A better solution is to track the process IDs and poll if all of them are still running. In Bash $! returns the ID of last initiated background process. If a process is running, the corresponding PID is found in directory /proc/.

Based on the ideas given in a Ubuntu forum thread and a template on command line parsing, I wrote a simple script “parallel” that allows you to run virtually any simple command concurrently.

Assume that you have a program proc and you want to run something like proc *.jpg using three concurrent processes. Then simply do

parallel -j 3 proc *.jpg

The script takes care of dividing the task. Obviously -j 3 stands for three simultaneous jobs.
If you need command line options, use quotes to separate the command from the variable arguments, e.g.

parallel -j 3 "proc -r -A=40" *.jpg

Furthermore, -r allows even more sophisticated commands by replacing asterisks in the command string by the argument:

parallel -j 6 -r "convert -scale 50% * small/small_*" *.jpg

I.e. this executes convert -scale 50% file1.jpg small/small_file1.jpg for all the jpg files. This is a real-life example for scaling down images by 50% (requires imagemagick).

Finally, here’s the script. It can be easily manipulated to handle different jobs, too. Just write your command between #DEFINE COMMAND and #DEFINE COMMAND END.

#!/bin/bash
NUM=0
QUEUE=""
MAX_NPROC=2 # default
REPLACE_CMD=0 # no replacement by default
USAGE="A simple wrapper for running processes in parallel.
Usage: `basename $0` [-h] [-r] [-j nb_jobs] command arg_list
 	-h		Shows this help
	-r		Replace asterix * in the command string with argument
	-j nb_jobs 	Set number of simultanious jobs [2]
 Examples:
 	`basename $0` somecommand arg1 arg2 arg3
 	`basename $0` -j 3 \"somecommand -r -p\" arg1 arg2 arg3
 	`basename $0` -j 6 -r \"convert -scale 50% * small/small_*\" *.jpg"

function queue {
	QUEUE="$QUEUE $1"
	NUM=$(($NUM+1))
}

function regeneratequeue {
	OLDREQUEUE=$QUEUE
	QUEUE=""
	NUM=0
	for PID in $OLDREQUEUE
	do
		if [ -d /proc/$PID  ] ; then
			QUEUE="$QUEUE $PID"
			NUM=$(($NUM+1))
		fi
	done
}

function checkqueue {
	OLDCHQUEUE=$QUEUE
	for PID in $OLDCHQUEUE
	do
		if [ ! -d /proc/$PID ] ; then
			regeneratequeue # at least one PID has finished
			break
		fi
	done
}

# parse command line
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then #  must be at least one arg
	echo "$USAGE" >&2
	exit 1
fi

while getopts j:rh OPT; do # "j:" waits for an argument "h" doesnt
    case $OPT in
	h)	echo "$USAGE"
		exit 0 ;;
	j)	MAX_NPROC=$OPTARG ;;
	r)	REPLACE_CMD=1 ;;
	\?)	# getopts issues an error message
		echo "$USAGE" >&2
		exit 1 ;;
    esac
done

# Main program
echo Using $MAX_NPROC parallel threads
shift `expr $OPTIND - 1` # shift input args, ignore processed args
COMMAND=$1
shift

for INS in $* # for the rest of the arguments
do
	# DEFINE COMMAND
	if [ $REPLACE_CMD -eq 1 ]; then
		CMD=${COMMAND//"*"/$INS}
	else
		CMD="$COMMAND $INS" #append args
	fi
	echo "Running $CMD" 

	$CMD &
	# DEFINE COMMAND END

	PID=$!
	queue $PID

	while [ $NUM -ge $MAX_NPROC ]; do
		checkqueue
		sleep 0.4
	done
done
wait # wait for all processes to finish before exit

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